Pieces: Part 1

John grew up as a mechanic on his father's fishing trawler out of Puget Sound. he was a lean twenty-three with thick hair and an electric grin on the day the acident happened. The trawler was tied up at the cannery dock. John got bored and set to tinkering with the engine. It was a stupid
thing, a dropped wrench. he reached for it wrong and the fly wheel caught his left hand and tore

his middle finger off. He took the finger with him to the emergency room and waited his turn on a crowded wooden bench with his hand and his finger wrapped in separate greasy rags. That was before they got so good at sewing things back on.

John's family believed you couldn't get to heaven packing less than you were born with. No circumsision in that clan. And any subtractions, accidental or incidental, had to be buried with you.

John kept the severed finger in formaldehyde. It turned brownish in the liquid and then stopped

changing. At 4th of July picnics he'd entertain the nieces and nephews by bringing out the jar so they could peer in. The liquid was smokey and the limp finger was bloated and ragged at one end. Only the faint shape of a grimey fingernail at the rounder tip proved that it was, truly, a finger. He kept the jar packed in a small wooden box cushioned by crumpled paper. For thirty-five years, whenever John moved or shipped out, the box went with him.

Then he was a grandad, thick and bald, the captain of a sea tug towing log rafts to the Phillipines.

Just back from three months at sea, John was driving home from the dock when his car was crushed by a stampeding garbage truck. The jar and its box were smashed in his sea-bag in the trunk. The reek of formaldehyde made the emergency crew wary of toxic chemicals. They scuttled into safety gear while John quietly stopped bleeding.

The funeral director put the finger, in its new jar, into the coffin before he closed it. John changes, but not that finger.

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